Steven Rosenberg has written a little article mentioning various self-hosted blogging platforms including Flatpress, Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Ode and others. I wanted to address a couple of his questions about Ode.

Though you can probably follow this post on it's own, I do recommend that you start by reading Steven's FlatPress and other flat-file blogging systems first. I'll wait...

OK, are we all back?

As I've already said, I wanted to add a couple of things about Ode and along with my opinion about a static mode, security, and some of the other topics Steven brings up in his post.

About implementing a static mode

1. I'm experimenting with two different types of static rendering at the moment.

The first is something like 'on demand'/just-in-time static. It works the way that you might guess it does. A static page is generated when a page is first requested. Subsequent requests for the same page are served statically.

The second is a dedicated static mode with which the entire site is generated offline.

In the end, I'll probably do both because a) I like the just-in-time solution and b) offline static mode is an often requested feature. To way of thinking, a project like this is about serving the interests of the community, not just scratching a personal itch.

However, Steven's right, I'm not a big proponent of static mode operation in general for several reasons. I'll mention just two...

Read the rest of this post